Month: October 2018

United Nations chief António Guterres said on Sunday he was following Sri Lanka’s deepening political crisis with “great concern”, after a man was killed allegedly by a politician’s bodyguard, who reportedly fired on a crowd of demonstrators. Sri Lanka’s President, Mathripala Sirisena, suspended the national Parliament for two weeks on Saturday, in an effort to build […]

Agricultural workers have the hardest time accessing food for themselves, and are often excluded from national labour and social protection frameworks, a United Nations independent human rights expert said on Tuesday. “Agricultural workers, including women, children and migrants and plantation workers, are increasingly faced with low wages, part-time work, informality, and a lack of social […]

With more than 7,000 Central-American refugees now on the march through Mexico towards the southern border of the United States in search of safety and work, all countries involved are being urged by the UN to liaise with key agencies on the ground providing support. Answering questions from reporters at the daily press briefing on […]

Separating children from their undocumented parents is a traumatic violation of their rights, UN independent experts said on Friday. The group of experts said in a statement that the treatment of migrants as criminals, provokes intolerance and xenophobia, in addition to posing a danger to their well-being. Criminalizing irregular migrants and addressing irregular migration through […]

Violence is on the rise in the occupied West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and Israeli authorities are continuing to demolish and confiscate Palestinian-owned homes and property, in contravention of international law, the United Nations envoy for the Middle East Peace Process said on Thursday. Briefing the Security Council, Nikolay Mladenov called on Israel to stop the […]

World Health Organization (WHO) Director-General, Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, has called an Emergency Committee meeting on the Ebola virus outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), which has already claimed around 130 lives. The WHO has assessed the national and regional risk of the current Ebola outbreak in DRC as “very high,” although […]